By Way of Illustration.
The peculiar quality which culture imparts is beyond the comprehension
of a child, and yet it is something so definite and engaging that a
child may recognise its presence and feel its attraction. One of the
special pieces of good fortune which fell to my boyhood was
companionship with a man whose note of distinction, while not entirely
clear to me, threw a spell over me. I knew other men of greater force
and of larger scholarship; but no one else gave me such an impression
of balance, ripeness, and fineness of quality. I not only felt a
peculiarly searching influence flowing from one who graciously put
himself on my level of intelligence, but I felt also an impulse to
emulate a nature which satisfied my imagination completely. Other men
of ability whose conversation I heard filled me with admiration; this
man made the world larger and richer to my boyish thought. There was
no didacticism on his part; there was, on the contrary, a simplicity
so great that I felt entirely at home with him; but he was so
thoroughly a citizen of the world that I caught a glimpse of the world
in his most casual talk. I got a sense of the largeness and richness
of life from him. I did not know what it was which laid such hold on
my mind, but I saw later that it was the remarkable culture of the
man,--a culture made possible by many fortunate conditions of wealth,
station, travel, and education, and expressing itself in a peculiar
largeness of vision and sweetness of spirit. In this man's friendship
I was for the moment lifted out of my own crudity into that vast
movement and experience in which all the races have shared.
I am often reminded of this early impulse and enthusiasm, but there
are occasions when its significance and value become especially clear
to me. It was brought forcibly to my mind several years ago by an hour
or two of talk with one who, as truly as any other American, stands as
a representative man of culture; one, that is, whose large scholarship
has been so completely absorbed that it has enriched the very texture
of his mind, and given him the gift of sharing the experience of the
race. It was on an evening when a play of Sophocles was to be rendered
by the students of a certain university in which the tradition of
culture has never wholly died out, and I led the talk along the lines
of the play. I was rewarded by an hour of such delight as comes only
from the best kind of talk, and I felt anew the peculiar charm and
power of culture. For what I got that enriched me and prepared me for
real comprehension of one of the greatest works of art in all
literature was not information, but atmosphere. I saw rising about me
the vanished life, which the dramatist knew so well that its secrets
of conviction and temperament were all open to him; in architecture,
poetry, religion, politics, and manners, it was quietly rebuilded for
me in such wise that my own imagination was stirred to meet the talker
half-way, and to fill in the outlines of a picture so swiftly and
skilfully sketched. When I went to the play I went as a contemporary
of its writer might have gone. I did not need to enter into it, for it
had already entered into me. A man of scholarship could have set the
period before me in a mass of facts; a man of culture alone could give
me power to share, for an evening at least, its spirit and life.
These personal illustrations will be pardoned, because they bring out
in the most concrete way that special quality which marks the
possession of culture in the deepest sense. That quality allies it
very closely with genius itself, in certain aspects of that rare and
inexplicable gift. For one of the most characteristic qualities of
genius is its power of divination, of sharing alien or diverse
experiences. It is this peculiar insight which puts the great
dramatists in possession of the secrets of so many temperaments, the
springs of so many different personalities, the atmosphere of such
remote periods of time,--which, in a way, gives them power to make the
dead live again; for Shakespeare can stand at the tomb of Cleopatra
and evoke not the shade, but the passionate woman herself out of the
dust in which she sleeps. There has been, perhaps, no more luminous
example of the faculty of sharing the experience of a past age, of
entering into the thought and feeling of a vanished race, than the
peculiar divination and rehabilitation of certain extinct phases of
emotion and thought which one finds in the pages of Walter Pater. In
those pages there are, it is true, occasional lapses from a perfectly
sound method; there is at times a loss of simplicity, a cloying
sweetness in the style of this accomplished writer. These are,
however, the perils of a very sensitive temperament, an intense
feeling for beauty, and a certain seclusion from the affairs of life.
That which characterises Mr. Pater at all times is his power of
putting himself amid conditions that are not only extinct, but obscure
and elusive; of winding himself back, as it were, into the primitive
Greek consciousness and recovering for the moment the world as the
Greeks saw, or, rather, felt it. It is an easy matter to mass the
facts about any given period; it is a very different and a very
difficult matter to set those facts in vital relations to each other,
to see them in true prospective. And the difficulties are immensely
increased when the period is not only remote, but deficient in
definite registry of thought and feeling; when the record of what it
believed and felt does not exist by itself, but must be deciphered
from those works of art in which is preserved the final form of
thought and feeling, and in which are gathered and merged a great mass
of ideas and emotions.
This is especially true of the more subtle and elusive Greek myths,
which were in no case creations of the individual imagination or of
definite periods of time, but which were fed by many tributaries, very
slowly taking shape out of general but shadowy impressions, widely
diffused but vague ideas, deeply felt but obscure emotions. To get at
the heart of one of these stories one must be able not only to enter
into the thought of the unknown poets who made their contributions to
the myth, but must also be able to disentangle the threads of idea and
feeling so deftly woven together, and follow each back to its shadowy
beginning. To do this, one must have not only knowledge, but sympathy
and imagination,--those closely related qualities which get at the
soul of knowledge and make it live again; those qualities which the
man of culture shares in no small measure with the man of genius. In
his studies of such myths as those which gather about Dionysus and
Demeter this is precisely what Mr. Pater did. He not only marked out
distinctly the courses of the main streams, but he followed back the
rivulets to their fountain-heads; he not only mastered the thought of
an extinct people, but, what is much more difficult, he put off his
knowledge and put on their ignorance; he not only entered into their
thought about the world of nature which surrounded them, but he
entered into their feeling about it. Very lightly touched and charming
is, for instance, his description of the habits and haunts and worship
of Demeter, the current impressions of her service and place in the
life of the world:--
"Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when the young lambs are
dropped; she visits the barns in autumn; she takes part in mowing
and binding up the corn, and is the goddess of sheaves. She
presides over the pleasant, significant details of the farm, the
threshing-floor, and the full granary, and stands beside the
woman baking bread at the oven. With these fancies are connected
certain simple rites, the half-understood local observance and
the half-believed local legend reacting capriciously on each
other. They leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel of meat at
the crossroads to take on her journey; and perhaps some real
Demeter carries them away, as she wanders through the country.
The incidents of their yearly labour become to them acts of
worship; they seek her blessing through many expressive names,
and almost catch sight of her at dawn or evening, in the nooks of
the fragrant fields. She lays a finger on the grass at the
roadside, and some new flower comes up. All the picturesque
implements of country life are hers; the poppy also, emblem of an
exhaustless fertility, and full of mysterious juices for the
alleviation of pain. The country-woman who puts her child to
sleep in the great, cradle-like basket for winnowing the corn
remembers Demeter _Kourotrophos_, the mother of corn and
children alike, and makes it a little coat out of the dress worn
by its father at his initiation into her mysteries.... She lies
on the ground out-of-doors on summer nights, and becomes wet with
the dew. She grows young again every spring, yet is of great age,
the wrinkled woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse of
Demophoon."
This bit of description moves with so light a foot that one forgets,
as true art always makes one forget, the mass of hard and scattered
materials which lie back of it, materials which would not have yielded
their secret of unity and vitality save to imagination and sympathy;
to knowledge which has ripened into culture. But the recovery of such
a story, the reconstruction of such a figure, are not affected by
description alone; one must penetrate to the heart of the myth, and
master the significance of the woman transformed by idealisation into
a beneficent and much labouring goddess. We must go with Mr. Pater a
step farther if we would understand how a man of culture divines the
deeper experiences of an alien race:--
"Three profound ethical conceptions, three impressive sacred
figures, have now defined themselves for the Greek imagination,
condensed from all the traditions which have now been traced,
from the hymns of the poets, from the instinctive and
unformulated mysticism of primitive minds. Demeter is become the
divine, sorrowing mother. Kore, the goddess of summer, is become
Persephone, the goddess of death, still associated with the forms
and odours of flowers and fruit, yet as one risen from the dead
also, presenting one side of her ambiguous nature to men's
gloomier fancies. Thirdly, there is the image of Demeter
enthroned, chastened by sorrow, and somewhat advanced in age,
blessing the earth in her joy at the return of Kore. The myth has
now entered upon the third phase of its life, in which it becomes
the property of those more elevated spirits, who, in the decline
of the Greek religion, pick and choose and modify, with perfect
freedom of mind, whatever in it may seem adapted to minister to
their culture. In this way the myths of the Greek religion become
parts of an ideal, visible embodiments of the susceptibilities
and intentions of the nobler kind of souls; and it is to this
latest phase of mythological development that the highest Greek
sculpture allies itself."
This illustration of the divination by which the man of culture
possesses himself of a half-forgotten and obscurely recorded
experience and rehabilitates and interprets it, is so complete that it
makes amplification superfluous.